On 7/26/2010 9:38 AM, John R Pierce wrote: > On 07/26/10 12:04 AM, Bob Hoffman wrote: > >> Thinking of just sitting on this for awhile? Thoughts? >> >> >> >> Last release for PHP 5.2& updates for 5.3 >> >> PHP Logo The users of PHP 5.2 should upgrade to 5.3 at their earliest >> convenience, as the active support of the 5.2 series came to an end with the >> release of version 5.2.14 earlier today. PHP 5.2.0 was released almost four >> years ago and according to the release announcement, >> http://www.php.net/archive/2010.php#id2010-07-22-1 >> > ... > > > sounds like a great reason to get away from using PHP entirely, since > they seem to be incapable of releasing upgrades that don't massively > break applications. 4 years is just too short of a life cycle for a > major release used in a production system. > > Always a dilemma. The very beauty of upstream therefore CentOS is that security issues will be backported to our current installations. In a hosting environment, you don't have to worry about breaking people's php websites/apps. The downside is the long lived old php versions do not run many of the new apps those same hosted clients wish to run. But in most cases, it's those same clients that build something and expect it to run forever and get very upset when they are told they must upgrade/rewrite their scripts. Of note. I did a 5.2 upgrade on one of our local use systems. I don't know how much more is broken, but for certain the standard CentOS install of SquirrelMail is borked. We don't use it on that system, so no big deal. I thought I'd post this just so those with mission critical machines would know that upgrading PHP does have an effect on at least this one upstream package. I can only assume if one looked deep enough, some other things may be broken as well. It really is hard to test 'everything' that a client may be using. To me, the fact that PHP seems to have a 4 year life cycle, further strengthens the use of CentOS with its 7 year life cycle. Yes, it is an inconvenience from time to time. We don't get to count how many times it is a convenience however. You only hear when it doesn't or can't work, not how many times something continues to work due to this mindset. John Hinton